Phil Prince was born Philip Joseph Prince in the Bronx borough of New York City. With a French & English father and an Irish mother, Phil grew up in a strongly Irish neighborhood. After his mother died when he was 12, he lost interest in school and left home at 13, heading for the Irish enclave of Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan, being taken in by the Irish mob and eventually also working with the Italian mob. Marrying a Puerto Rican stripper Teresa, the couple began performing live sex shows for the Avon Theaters, a chain of east-coast sex theaters based in NYC. Teresa was murdered in 1977, and Phil increasingly took various management work for the Avon Theaters. Replacing Avon's first in-house director Joe Davian, who directed films in the late 70s, Phil eventually started writing and directing low-budget, increasingly extreme BDSM-themed porn movies for Avon in the early 1980s - films that became key exhibits of the Meese Commission on pornography in 1986. On June 6, 1984, Prince was involved in a drug-money-related shooting that sent him to prison for four and a half years, after which he became a truck driver until a tank-trailer explosion injured him in 2008 and forced him to retire. Phil Prince died at home in upstate NY in 2018, at the age of 65.

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